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Tuesday, April 16, 2013

What and how are you reading?

It’s an odd thing, reading. It should be quite simple, but it
isn’t. There’s so much going on when you run your eyes over a page and not all
of it has to do with what is on the page, or what the writer intended that you
take from the page.

For example, I wrote a book called Boy on a Wire. I thought it was quite a simple tale about bullying,
loss of faith and heavy metal poisoning, set mainly in a boarding school and a small
country town. And yet I have lost count of the number of people who said told
me it is tale of a masturbating boy.

In order to help myself understand this reading I ran a word
search on the book. Here’s the result:

Rotary - 10

Wank – 8, Wanker – 4, Wanking – 15

Christ – 13, Jesus – 44, Church – 37

Shit – 31, fuck – 22

Salt – 36

Love – 36

Laugh – 60, laughter – 4, laughing – 20

On this evidence, the book is much more a story about
Jesus, church and a laugh filled love of salt.

This is a quite a different book with a "shit" and
"fuck" blow-out and one with a few more “laughs”, yet roughly the
same amount of “laughter” and “laughing”. One reviewer wrote that this book was
full of "sweat" and "sex". Clearly missing the drunkenness,
the race issues and the "love"

Fascinating that any book can be read in so many
different ways, even by the same reader in different settings, or at different
stages of a life.

I have found and ordered a book called The Psychology of Readingand will post
again after I have read it, with great care, deliberation, and with as much awareness
as I can muster, given I will be reading about the psychology of a process while
engaged in that very process.